PANORAMA CITY : Residents March and Rally Against Crime

Max Mrohs remembers the good old days when people didn’t have to hide in their homes behind barricaded doors to be safe from crime.

“I used to walk over to the market at night to pick up milk or whatever, and I don’t even drive over there anymore,” says Mrohs, who moved to Panorama City 27 years ago from Sylmar.

Mrohs, like many residents, is fed up with crime, so he is working to make his neighborhood safer. On Tuesday night, he marched with others in a neighborhood march and rally against crime.

The event, which drew about 50 people, was part of a nationwide program called “America’s Night Out Against Crime” to promote safe neighborhoods.

A similar rally in Sun Valley drew about 200 people, said Councilman Richard Alarcon, who attended both rallies. He was joined at the Panorama City rally by Assemblyman Richard Katz of the 39th District and Fred Flores, representing Congressman Howard Berman.

“There are a lot of good people in this neighborhood,” said Leslie Yamashita, director of the Panorama City West Neighborhood Assn., which organized the event. “We want everybody to get together, see each other, attach a name to a face, get a sense of neighborhood going.”

“People need to realize that we can take our streets back, we can take our lives back,” said Georgia Bender, a member of the North Hills Optimist Club, which helped organize the march.

The participants gathered in the parking lot behind the Panorama Mall, then split into two groups for a short march through the densely populated neighborhood, which, according to police, has in recent years seen an influx of drug dealers and gang-related violence.

Part of the problem is that drug dealers are renting apartments in the neighborhood, then dealing drugs on the street to customers who come to the area in cars, said Tim Bergstrom, senior lead officer for the Van Nuys area of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Landlords could help solve the problem by being more careful about who they rent to, said Bergstrom, who also spoke at the rally.

“We need all the apartment managers to get on board and screen applicants who come in,” he said.

Some managers are hiring security guards to prevent drug dealing from their buildings, Bergstrom said. The guards take down the license plate numbers of customers who come into the neighborhood to buy drugs, then turn the numbers over to police, he said.

That has been a deterrent because buyers don’t want any involvement with the police, he said.

Ron Mayer, president of the neighborhood association, manages four apartment buildings on Cedros Avenue. He agrees that it’s essential to get apartment managers involved in the effort.

But he said he has had a difficult time recruiting area apartment managers to help clean up the area so that respectable tenants will want to live in the neighborhood.

Landlords “are somewhere else, living in a safe neighborhood, so unless they are really hurting, it is difficult to get them involved,” he said.

But Mayer and others at the rally stressed that they wanted to throw a positive light on the situation. Mayer and others say the vigilance of neighborhood associations is beginning to pay off.

“There is definitely a feeling of change,” Bender said. “Prostitutes have been driven off Sepulveda Boulevard” due to the efforts of a business organization in that area, she said.

Alarcon said his office is continuing its efforts to put more street lights in the neighborhood to reduce crime.